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10/12/2002

Solids Matter

Art in General, New York

In Art in General's street window Cecilia Galiena has orchestrated a small linguistic black hole. Front and center repose a covey of little paintings of gesturing newsmakers lifted from photographs, the spaces between their signifying hands enigmatically filled with geometric solids.

The paintings loiter about in front of a chatty white wall on which appear two corresponding texts and drawings. On the left the word ''Calm'' is scrawled beneath a crude three dimensional half erased segmented torus like shape, and to its right the phrase ''National Safety Standards'' appears above an awkward shoe boxy shape. This central panel has interrupted a single white on black mural. On the left wall of the installation the words ''Very Precise Language'' sit beneath a rectangle with four odd serrations running along one side, while the right wall holds the words ''Final Touches'' underneath five cubic shapes which appear to be lining up with the notched rectangle to play a game of musical chairs. The paintings initiate an irresistible urge to formulate a narrative. Condelezza Rice, FDR, Putin et al. seem to be skulking off with chunks of frozen words lifted from the walls around them.

Galiena's annotated and displaced solids concretize the symbolic ephemera of words and gestures and miraculously drag them into the touchable,visible, visceral Here and Now. The prerequisite skill for accomplishing this feat is to master the rhetoric of linguistics, and Galiena is certainly adept-she wittily slices the signified from the referent and unpacks the signifier-but these games just get her started. She uses her mind like a starter's pistol; theory instantly generates action without artifice.

It is no accident she executes the murals with her left, untrained hand. She is after complete transparency. Her strategies and tools are as simple as possible so as to generate the simplest unanswerable questions.
Where does the body end and the mind begin? Where does the mind end and the art begin?
When we look at a thing and think of the word for it, does the word matter?
When we think of a thing but there is no thing there, does the thing matter?
When we draw a thing and give it a name are we lying?

The lumpy text drawings give crazy weight and presence to our instinctive urge to communicate, but more intriguingly, they address our even more primitive and urgent impulse to force ourselves upon the world, to have some attention paid. Words focus us, but if we insist on their meaning something, they lay a trail of bread crumbs which lead to a tough paradox; this universe we love to discourse upon is wordless and chaotic; beyond syntax. The more we talk, the further we get from what we talk about.

What to do? We are told language is wired into us, and the thought makes us itchy. If all this talk is as instinctive as breathing, than we don't have to apologize for being so noisy, but really, don't we think more of our wonderful words than that?

Galiena pushes us off balance and we are slow to respond. We can't think about these heavy things for very long, they are so much trouble. Which is fine, for heavy thinking won't get us out of this one. Brains are only half the story. Songs of signs and signifiers are all right, but those dreamy half besotted questions the works inspire after we are done thinking the heavy simple questions-How do you read a face? What does John Wayne mean? Could you talk to someone backwards or inside out?-those questions agitate the entire spirit as only art can.

Art in General
USA - New York - 79 Walker Street
tel 212-219-0473

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